Starting at QA Consulting

Monday, 31 October 2016

We have been working on Microsoft CRM dynamics for a while
now. We have looked at how the program works and how it can be used within a
company to improve customer relations. We have also started looking at ADX
which is an extension of dynamics.

Honestly this work is so dry and boring I’m writing this
blog to not have to do it for a while.

Since theres not much else for me to report on im gunna
start writing a random story in automatic writing mode (where you type what you
think) okay here goes.

There was a large moon in the sky of evenings. This moon
decided he was not going to play baseball in the summer tournament as he sucked
at it. The PlayStation he had was plenty good enough and he could play baseball
on it anyway.

Okay keeping a story relevant and blog safe is difficult so
I give up.

Woking seems like a nice place anyway, expensive though.
probably won’t be putting too much money away to start unfortunately

This text is here to reach the blog limit This text is here
to reach the blog limit

Wednesday, 26 October 2016

For the past 2 weeks, I have been off work for my Uncles
wedding in Greece, more specifically: Santorini, a Greek island.

During the time in Santorini, we stayed in a hotel complex
with most of my extended family on my dad’s side. Unfortunately, the hotel didn’t
have a pool so I decided to read instead. I ended up reading 5 and a half books
in a week.

We took my nan with us and she currently has 2 broken hips
and a knee with 3 breakpoints. This caused a lot of stress travelling and
getting around on holiday. Fortunately, the people at the airport were helpful
but I was tasked to do all the wheelchair pushing whilst there (we were halfway
up a mountain).

The wedding was amazing, Greek people are so friendly (if
your family is about to be merged anyway) even if you can’t understand them!

The highlight of the holiday was the food. I got to eat Greek
salads, swordfish, veal, lamb, beef, pork; you name it. And the olives. The
olives were divine.

Fira

Fira is the capital of Santorini and was packed full of
people (unsurprisingly mostly all tourists). The port for cruise ships is
located at the bottom of the cliff face which is linked to the town/city via a
cable car system.

Since we didn’t have any transport and Fira was within
walking distance (barely, it took 45 minutes each way), we ended up walking
there several times during the holiday; including to go to pubs and bars for
football and Greek beer (which is amazing).

Random beaches assorted around the island

There is a red, white and black beach on Santorini. The red
beach is about 30 meters long and is not very impressive at all apart from the
fact its red. The white beach is just a beach.. but the black beach which
almost surrounds the island (since its volcanic, that’s what makes it black)
were stone beaches which had restaurants along the front. When I went in the
sea, there were fish everywhere and if you dive and try and touch them, they
just slowly move. The wind was pretty damn strong causing the current to be kind
of crazy until they raised the red flags for about 2 hours signalling to not go
in the sea as it is dangerous.

Some History I learned about the islands

We went on an island coach tour and the tour guide told us
some very interesting things about the Greek island known for its luxury
resorts.

12 of the Greek islands including Thira(Santorini) and
Thirasia used to be joined and were part of the Cyclades island.

The name Santorini comes from a church of Saint “Irene” in
which the franks named the island around the 1500s

Thira was the name of a Greek King and a nearby island
Thirasia was named after his daughter.

Wednesday, 28 September 2016

So far at QA Consulting I have really enjoyed my time
meeting people, doing work and socialising after work. I am getting slightly
more used to working 9–5:30 but it’s still hard getting up. I have been
assigned a c# job in Woking with 3 other people but I’m not sure if it’s a
definite or not as I haven’t heard anything else about it yet.

Some guys from a different group in QA organised football
for the office and we played a 5 a side tournament. There was a good turnout of
around 20 people. The team I was in was decent and we won the tournament. During the week after, some guys in my group
decided we would try and make it a weekly thing. The next Tuesday we got 10
people down to the 5 a side pitch to play for an hour which was great.

During the last couple of weeks we have been working in
teams of 8 on Enterprise Architecture (EA). This consisted of acting as a
consultancy firm called “Rambert & Rooster”(R&R). During the first week
of EA, we were located in the Lowry which is a theatre in media city. This was
a nice change of scenery and the round tables really worked well for
collaboration between the members of the group.

As R&R, we looked at the company “NB Gardens” business
processes. NB Gardens had very poor processes all round and we had to work out
a solution that would fix their problems.

Their problems areas were:

Order replenishment process

Customer order management process

We had to carry out interviews with staff members from NB Gardens
to practice interview techniques. This was important as if we didn’t ask the
correct questions; we didn’t get the correct information we needed, so a lot of
preparation was needed.

Our solution was:

·Add more IT to all departments to get the
process to be faster, more efficient and more reliable.

·Merge the call center properly and merge COFT
with them to make the process more streamlined

·Implement a Quality department to allow the company
to resolve future issues internally and carry out process improvement on a
regular basis

At the end of the 2 weeks we had an exam on all the stuff we
covered and a presentation to show our groups findings to the “company”, NB
Gardens.

Last week I had to write a technical blog in which the topic
was computer hardware. Since this was the first blog on the topic I did a
general overview on things to note, which parts you need and a bit about each
part. For my upcoming technical blogs I will be looking at specific parts of a
computer and look into important aspects of each one in detail.

Overall I think my first month at QA Consulting has been
good. I have met a lot of really cool
people and hope to meet more soon.

Tuesday, 13 September 2016

During my first few days at QA Consulting I have met many people,
all of whom (staff and fellow trainees) have been very friendly and
cooperative. Before I moved to Manchester for this opportunity I didn't really
know what to expect and this obviously caused me to feel very nervous about the
whole thing. After arriving I realised that the environment of the QA offices
are very relaxed but provide enough work and lectures to have a lot of get on
with.

Finding accommodation in Manchester for 3 months was very
difficult.

Joe (a friend I referred) and I luckily managed to get a flat
share close to work, about a 10 minute walk away.

On the first day I was expecting most of the other trainees to be
from a computer science related background. Only a third or so of the trainees
in my class did computer science so the level of programming was back to basics,
which benefited me as a recap. I tried my best to help those that hadn’t
experienced programming before, which also helped to be able to explain
technical concepts and examples to others better.

We started with Java tasks which included some simpler tasks to
start with to get used to using loops and if statements. These tasks gradually
got harder by implementing difficult math tasks and object oriented
programming. I have found these tasks slightly challenging in some aspects,
especially further towards the later ones and I did programming for 3 years.
Even though I have found the programming tasks relatively easy going overall, I
have definitely improved on my object oriented programming. Some tips such as
generating getters and setters for the class are highly useful and I will be
using them in the future.

We were asked to do a presentation in pairs about different design
patterns. Tom and I did ours on the prototype design pattern. The experience of
doing this was beneficial for confidence in public speaking as well as
improving team working skills.

On Friday the company has a drinks gathering in the office for
people to get to know each other better and have fun. I really enjoyed having a
few drinks and meeting people and seeing what interests others in the office
have. Some of the trainees, who have been at QA for around 10 weeks that will
be graduating soon, gave us some general advice which was great.

During week 2, we started doing continuous integration. This topic
involved setting up virtual machines, looking further into devops processes and
how the lifecycle of software development has evolved to form the devops
culture. The virtual boxes were set up through vagrant and oracles virtual box.
The two Linux distributions we used were Ubuntu 15.10 and centOS 7.

The second part of this topic was scripting in Bash and shell
alongside some terminal work to get used to performing commands and scripting
in general. I found scripting a bit difficult to start with as it’s not hugely
similar to the conventional languages like java in which I am used to.

Overall my first few weeks at QA have been enjoyable and have
learnt an extensive amount.